one could
find a chauffeur to make the journey if one was prepared to pay. Given
fine weather, it was an ideal place for a day off in the spring. And
Peter knew it.

In the Grand Magasin Julie had talked of a day off, and a party of four
had been mooted, but when he had leisure to think of it, Peter found
himself averse to four, and particularly if one of the four were to be
Donovan. He admitted it freely to himself. Donovan was the kind of a
man, he thought, that Julie must like, and he was the kind of man, too,
to put him, Peter, into the shade. Ordinarily he asked for no better
companion, but he hated to see Julie and Jack together. He could not make
the girl out, and he wanted to do so. He wanted to know what she thought
about many things, and--incidentally, of course--what she thought about
him.

He had argued all this over next morning while shaving, and had ended
by cutting himself. It was a slight matter, but it argued a certain
absent-mindedness, and it brought him back to decency. He perceived that
he was scheming to leave his friend out, and he fought resolutely against
the idea. Therefore, that afternoon, he went to the hospital, spent a
couple of hours chatting with the men, and finally wound up in the
nurses' mess-room for tea as usual. It was a little room, long and
narrow, at the end of the biggest ward, but its windows looked over the
sea and it was convenient to the kitchen. Coloured illustrations cut from
magazines and neatly mounted on brown paper decorated the walls, but
there was little else by way of furniture or ornament except a long table
and chairs. One could get but little talk except of a scrappy kind, for
nurses came continually in and out for tea, and, indeed, Julie had only a
quarter of an hour to spare. But he got things fixed up for the following
Thursday, and he left the place to settle with Donovan.

That gentleman's company of native labour was lodged a mile or so through
the docks from Peter's camp, on the banks of the Tancarville Canal. It
was enlivened at frequent intervals, day and night, by the sirens of
tugs bringing strings of barges to the docks, whence their cargo was
borne overseas in the sea-going tramps, or, of course, taking equally
long strings to the Seine for Rouen and Paris. It was mud and cinders
underfoot, and it was walled off with corrugated-iron sheeting and
barbed wire from the attentions of some hundreds of Belgian refugees who
lived along the canal and par